Pomazun, an army veteran with a history of petty crime and unstable behavior, confessed to the killings, and in his widely covered trial claimed to have murdered many more innocent people during the Second Chechen War in classified missions as an agent of the GRU.
Sergey Aleksandrovich Pomazun (Серге́й Алекса́ндрович Помазу́н) was born on June 3, 1981, in Kupino, a village in Shebekinsky District, Belgorod Oblast, Soviet Union.
His father, Alexander Pomazun, was a long-time employee at a fertilizer factory until leaving in the 1990s due to a serious salary delay, and ran a private hunting farm in the Shebekinsky district.
Pomazun received a 5-year and 1-month sentence at a low-security penal colony, but required only serving during weekdays and was allowed weekend furloughs at home.
On December 20, 2012, Pomazun was released from prison, moving in with his parents and living in a largely asocial life playing video games.
According to Alexander Pomazun, he had begun to behave aggressively returning from the test, and upon arriving home shouted about Chechnya and the GRU then attacked his father with a knife which he had previously purchased.
At about 14:16 (UTC+3) Pomazun went to the Okhota hunting store located near the intersection of Popova Street and Narodny Boulevard, where he demanded they sell him ammunition.
Pomazun then exited the store and in broad daylight shot three random people that were walking by, with two of them, a man and a 14-year-old schoolgirl, dying at the scene.
He drove to the edge of forest on the outskirts of Belgorod and abandoned the car, then walked several kilometers into the woods where he changed his clothes and buried the gun he had used in the shooting.
A combined force of around 2,000 policemen started an extensive manhunt searching for Pomazun, with Belgorod authorities offering a reward of 3 million rubles for his capture.
On April 23, the night after the shooting, Pomazun was arrested near a railway station in Kursk Oblast where he was attempting to flee on a freight train.
[1][2][3][4][5][6] In response to the shooting, April 23 and 24 were declared days of mourning in Belgorod Oblast, and the authorities promised to give out a million rubles to each of the victims' families.
Pomazun testified that he plotted to kill the security guard who had insulted him, and that he only intended to steal more weapons and ammunition from the gun store to be better prepared for a possible firefight with the intervening police following the planned murder.
Pomazun claimed that his battalion participated in a series of special operations in Chechnya in order to intimidate the population, where they killed nearly a thousand innocent people "all the way from Mozdok to Khasavyurt".